The writer, actor, and director Sacha Guitry emerged from the theater to become one of Frances best-known and most inventive filmmakers, and "La poison" marked his first major collaboration with another titan of the screen, the incomparably expressive Michel Simon. With Guitrys witty dialogue and fleet pacing, this black comedy is the quintessential depiction of a marriage gone sour: after thirty years together, a village gardener (Simon) and his wife (Germaine Reuver) find themselves contemplating how to do away with each other, with the former even planning how hell negotiate his eventual criminal trial. Inspired by Guitrys own postWorld War II tangle with the lawa wrongful charge of collaborationism"La poison" is a blithely caustic broadside against the French legal system and a society all too eager to capitalize on the misfortunes of others.